[extropy-chat] Astronomical question

[kevinfreels.com]

I seem to barely recall having a 9600 baud modem at one point and hooking up
to an online bbs called compupress. Of course I was in 5th grade, so I don;t
know a heck of a lot more about it. I was into my Vic 20 back then and
writing simple computer games in BASIC, but when the C64 came out, my dad
wouldn't finance my hobby stating that this "computer craze is just a
passing fad, you need to get educated into some kind of trade". Of course he
would say that as a Union electrical worker. It wasn;t until my first 133
Mhz pentium that I even saw another computer or realized just how wrong he
was. I feel sometimes that missed out on a lot of opportunity because of
this. Now I can code HTML, build a system, get any Windows OS to boot, and
hook up an NT network using various protocols, but all the higher stuff
seems just out of my reach. Same thing with higher mathematics. I was never
encouraged.

Now I find myself trying to learn Trig on my own and it seems so much harder
to really learn than in gradeschool. I am familiar with how the language
center grows at a fantastic rate as a child and as an adult you simply
cannot learn a 2nd, 3rd, or even 10th language like you could when you were
a kid. I often wonder if this isn't the same with math.





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Goddard" <iamgoddard at yahoo.com>
To: <extropy-chat at extropy.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2005 11:28 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Astronomical question


> --- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > It is a well known phenomenon that the moon is
> > draining angular momentum from the earth, thus
> > slowing earth's rotation and causing the moon to
> > orbit at a greater distance from earth.
> >
> > I just started wondering if anyone has figured out
> > how far away the moon has to get to escape earth
> > orbit, how far into the future that will happen,
> > and how much earth's day will be slowed by the time
> > that happens.....
>
>
>  That process wont continue indefinitely. What's
> happening is that the earth/moon system is slowly
> "gravitating" toward synchronous rotation, or tidal
> lock.
>
>  The moon is already tidally locked on the earth (and
> thus only one side of the moon faces the earth). The
> earth's rotation is slowing due to the moon's
> influence only to the point where it too will be
> tidally locked to the moon (at which point an observer
> on the moon would see only one side of the earth). The
> moon's moving away is part of this process and is due
> to conservation of the momentum in the earth/moon
> system such that as the earth losses momentum the moon
> gains it in taking a wider orbit.
>
>  Once the earth/moon system has reached synchronous
> rotation, or orbital stability, it's my understanding
> that the earth/moon-system-induced changes in question
> (earth slowing & moon recession) will be stabilized.
> That would probably be millions of years from now.
>
>
>
> http://iangoddard.net/journal.htm
>
> David Hume on induction: "When we have lived any time,
> and have been accustomed to the uniformity of nature,
> we acquire a general habit, by which we always
> transfer the known to the unknown, and conceive the
> latter to resemble the former. By means of this
> general habitual principle, we regard even one
> experiment as the foundation of [empirical] reasoning,
> and expect a similar event with some degree of certainty."
>
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